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Part of
Corpus Approaches to Social Media
Edited by Sofia Rüdiger and Daria Dayter
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 98] 2020
► pp. 149–174

Chapter 7
Constructing corpora from images and text

An introduction to Visual Constituent Analysis

| Loughborough University
| Lancaster University
| Lancaster University

Visual analysis represents a significant oversight in the corpus literature, and possibly one that may lead to unintended omissions, particularly when analysing social media. In this chapter we introduce Visual Constituent Analysis (VCA), a method of multimodal corpus construction that allows researchers to construct and analyse visual aspects of online media in large-scale corpora. The chapter addresses the shortcomings of a purely textual approach to discourse analysis when dealing with social media texts and offers a solution using computer ‘Vision’-based image annotation (in our case Google Cloud Vision). Finally, we demonstrate how our approach can be used to analyse a sample of 150,000 micro-blog posts from Twitter and show the difference in level of user interaction with combined image/texts over language-only social media texts.

Keywords: corpus construction, multimodality, images, Twitter, information operations
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Opportunities and obstacles – Why ‘visual’?
  • 3.Tentative solutions – Constructing ‘constituents’
    • 3.1Vision
    • 3.2Concatenating outputs
  • 4.Analysing T-IRA with VCA
    • 4.1Hostile state information operations
    • 4.2T-IRA – a general overview
  • 5.Quantifying the importance of images
    • 5.1Images, likes and retweets
    • 5.2Text-image overlap
  • 6.T-IRA – A case study
    • 6.1Data
    • 6.2Method
    • 6.3Analysis
      • 6.3.1Image reference (IR)
      • 6.3.2Image and text reference (ITR)
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.98.07chr
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